Behold Tammy Duckworth, Democratic Congresswoman elect for Illinois’ 8th district and a relatively comprehensive symbol of the sickness of the present age.

She is married — to a man with a different last name, at least according to the linked Wikipedia page — and evidently has no children. A terminal careerist, she joined the Army and entered flight school, apparently because it was one of the few combat positions open to women. While in the Army, she finished her Ph.D. in “political economy and public health.” During a tour in Iraq, her helicopter was shot down and she was badly injured, losing both legs. After recovery, she promptly went to work, first for the Illinois state government and then for the federal government, before running for political office and defeating an incumbent Congressman in the recent election. She appears to be a conventional liberal in every respect, including her support for abortion and same-sex “marriage.” I could find no reference to any religious practice.

At least one of my (ostensibly Catholic) friends is already cheering her for being an inspiration. Yes, Catholics are cheering about a childless careerist and vocal defender of perversion and infanticide, badly maimed while gratuitously putting herself in harm’s way (with the complicity of “men”) to participate in an unjust war just to stick it to the patriarchy. The rot goes deep.

—- Comments —-

Jane S. writes:

In a previous discussion at VFR about Duckworth, Lawrence Auster wrote:

I’m blown away by this. On one hand, what Maj. Duckworth is saying is the essence of American fairness and uprightness. On the other hand, there is something insane about the idea of a woman’s even being put in such a position, i.e., being put in the armed forces, where her notion of “fairness” would require that she take a combat position alongside men. But this is what America has become. All the excellent, brave, competent, “ready” qualities of Americans, that make us what we are, are still there, but now those qualities are serving and operating within a value system that is sick and evil, a value system that places women in military situations where they can be blown up by enemy rockets and treats that as a “normal” thing to do.

Again, we’re seeing this bizarre new American thing, combining excellent American virtues on one side with feminism and sexual equality and everything that that means on the other. So I both admire these people very much, and I utterly oppose what they’re doing and what they stand for, the normalization of women in combat, one of the sickest things in the history of the world.

Mr. Auster makes an excellent point. On the one hand, Duckworth represents admirable values, the kind that Christians would cheer. But those values are being put into service of a value system that is sick and evil, which Christians somehow don’t see.

Laura writes:

Yes, exactly.

Obviously Duckworth is a very sympathetic figure and has laudable strength, endurance and determination, but these are devoted to the wrong ends.

Lawrence Auster writes:

Thank you for quoting my April 2005 entry on Tammy Duckworth. That entry was linked from another entry posted at the same time, entitled “The ambiguous thing that America now is,” which with your permission I would like to quote:

The strange American consciousness I discussed in relation to the legless Maj. Tammy Duckworth and her husband, this completely calm, taken-for-granted attitude that people now have toward putting a woman in a combat theater where she gets both her legs blown off, represents something new and uncanny in the world, a truly post-modern phenomenon: the seamless joining of the finest American qualities with the abomination of desolation.

What do I mean by this? Though the abomination of desolation, or the desolating sacrilege, is spoken of by Jesus as a single event that will occur in the last days, there is not a single desolating sacrilege, there are many (just as there is not a single anti-Christ, but many, who can be seen as precursors of the anti-Christ in the Book of Revelation), and one of these desolating sacrileges is putting women in combat as a discretionary choice and then treating it as normal and even a thing to be proud of when women are killed or receive terrible injuries. This is what I mean when I say that the finest American qualities are now in service to the abomination of desolation.